Anyway, the fur interests me less than a couple other parts. First, how do they do the blurred distant background? Is it pre-rendered? Or are they doing something fancy, like rendering the background into a low-res texture, blurring it, and then drawing it behind everything else?

Same with the bloom effect. I didn't know the PS2 could run a blur on a texture. Of course, I don't know anything about the PS2's hardware, but still, I'm impressed.

Anyway, the fur interests me less than a couple other parts. First, how do they do the blurred distant background? Is it pre-rendered? Or are they doing something fancy, like rendering the background into a low-res texture, blurring it, and then drawing it behind everything else?

Same with the bloom effect. I didn't know the PS2 could run a blur on a texture. Of course, I don't know anything about the PS2's hardware, but still, I'm impressed.

GLSL Shaders anyone? I'm no expert, but I've seen a GLSL pixel shader that made fuzzy fur on any kind of mesh. GLUT fuzzy teapots and all. I found this link for ATI specific extensions but you may be able to work it into GLSL.

Very cool demo! I've never seen fur in real-time that I can recall. It looks surprisingly good. I'm not sure the fins really add anything since the shells seem to do the trick all on their own IMHO.

Strangely (or not so strangely with Xcode sometimes), changing to unsigned char didn't fix the problem right away. For some reason Xcode simply couldn't get it out of its brain that the problem had been fixed. I tried cleaning the project and it still refused to see reality. After trying to build it and changing a couple different lines to trip it up it finally picked up the correction. Weird! I don't think that's the first time I've encountered that happening.